This
success attends your lordship's thoughts, which would look like
chance if it were not perpetual and always of the same tenor. If I
grant that there is care in it, it is such a care as would be
ineffectual and fruitless in other men; it is the curiosa felicitas
which Petronius ascribes to Horace in his odes. We have not
wherewithal to imagine so strongly, so justly, and so pleasantly:
in short, if we have the same knowledge, we cannot draw out of it
the same quintessence; we cannot give it such a turn, such a
propriety, and such a beauty. Something is deficient in the manner
or the words, but more in the nobleness of our conception. Yet when
you have finished all, and it appears in its full lustre; when the
diamond is not only found, but the roughness smoothed; when it is
cut into a form and set in gold, then we cannot but acknowledge that
it is the perfect work of art and nature; and every one will be so
vain to think he himself could have performed the like until he
attempts it. It is just the description that Horace makes of such a
finished piece; it appears so easy,
"Ut sibi quivis
Speret idem, sudet multum, frustraque laboret,
Ausus idem.
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